Microsoft Corp. and chip makers including Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are working on the DirectX 11 application programming interface (API) to maximize its potential for more realistic graphics, improved multimedia performance and other features in Windows 7. Software designed to unload tasks from the CPU to graphics processing cores is not new, but Microsoft aims to maximize on the potential of breaking up tasks to multiple cores in its new operating system.

Nvidia is using DirectX 11 with Windows 7 and its own hardware to accelerate certain tasks, such as image manipulation. "Microsoft did a number of things within the operating system that allow us to take the computing horsepower we developed for visual computing and apply it to a range of tasks that have never been seen before," saidNed Finkle, vice president of strategic marketing at Nvidia.

Neal Robison, director of independent software vendor relations at AMD, said that DirectX 11 efficiently harnesses the huge potential of parallel processing with GPUs. "We're going to see gaming at a whole new level of realism that you've never been able to experience before because it just hasn't been possible," he said, while giving another example of how Windows 7 will use the technology to push interoperability by automatically converting video on-the-fly to an appropriate format while transferring to a portable device.

Graphics cards currently available on the market, or integrated graphics, support DirectX 10/10.1, but AMD showed off a prototype DirectX 11 GPU back in June.

Originally posted by DXR88: A new directX runtime can't we stick with 10.1 and fix its huge resource issue before rolling the next one out please.

Perhapse it is quicker to make a whole new one than to fix the bugs in the old one! Or maybe they are telling the truth, and they have figured out how to do multi-core processing better (thanks to AMD/ATI & NVIDIA).

The interesting thing this time around, is that if you dig up a few of the more technical articles, as well as articles referring to the early showings, it appears that this one actually *IS* going to have some improvement. Coupled with Win7's multi-threaded optimization (Early tests reveal that it should indeed be better optimized for multi core than Vista), this could be a great step.

I guess one other thing that I'd kind of like to see as a focus, thought it won't happen, is the ability not just to shift things ONTO the GPU, but also off. Whether you've got a card that doesn't have a lot of stream processors, or if your card eventually becomes less capable of handling harder tasks in the future, it would be nice for the system to be able (so long as your cpu and ram were ample) to better take some of the GPU's workload and speed things up a bit. With so many games already being SO VERY GPU intensive... I'm concerned that trying to add too many tasks onto it might create a negative result. I'm all for multi-threading management, but I really hope M$\NVidia\Ati are considering the ability to make that go both ways, not just ONTO the GPU.